Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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These Little Volcanic Caverns Were Lined With Specular
Iron, Which Cannot Be Called Oligiste Iron, Since M. Gay-Lussac's
Last
Experiments on the oxides of iron.) When melted matter moves
on a very gentle slope, the great axis of the
Cavity formed by the
elastic fluids is nearly horizontal, or parallel to the plane on
which the movement of transition takes place. A similar
disengagement of vapours, joined to the elastic force of the gases,
which penetrate strata softened and raised up, appears sometimes to
have given great extent to the caverns found in trachytes or
trappean porphyries. These porphyritic caverns, in the Cordilleras
of Quito and Peru, bear the Indian name of Machays.* (* Machay is a
word of the Quichua language, commonly called by the Spaniards the
Incas' language. Callancamachay means a cavern as large as a house,
a cavern that serves as a tambo or caravansarai.) They are in
general of little depth. They are lined with sulphur, and differ by
the enormous size of their openings from those observed in volcanic
tufas* in Italy, at Teneriffe, and in the Andes. (*Sometimes fire
acts like water in carrying off masses, and thus the cavities may
be caused by an igneous, though more frequently by an aqueous
erosion or solution.) It is by connecting in the mind the
primitive, secondary, and volcanic rocks, and distinguishing
between the oxidated crust of the globe, and the interior nucleus,
composed perhaps of metallic and inflammable substances, that we
may account for the existence of grottoes everywhere.
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